Sapphire launches its own R9 290X graphics card

As expected, Sapphire has now officially launched the latest member of the AMD Radeon R9 series, the flagship Radeon R9 290X. Since all R9 290X cards will be based on a reference AMD design, there is little to none room for partners to differentiate its own graphics card from the rest of the competition but Sapphire has went an extra mile to include a rather unique sticker on the cooler shroud.

In case you somehow managed to miss it earlier, the Radeon R9 290X is based on AMD's new 28nm Hawaii XT GPU with 2816 stream processors, 176 texture memory units, 64 ROPs and a 512-bit memory interface. It comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory and usually, as it is the case with Sapphire version, is clocked at 850MHz for the GPU base, 1000MHz for the GPU boost clocks while 4GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1250MHz (5.0GHz effective). As expected, Sapphire will have two SKUs, with and without an Origin key for the EA/DICE Battlefield 4 game.

Sapphire is definitely one of the biggest AMD exclusive AIB partners on the market and will most likely end up with more volume and probably have the lowest prices, depending on the region of course. Custom versions of the R9 290X should be ready by end of November and we are sure that Sapphire will have a few at least, maybe even a Toxic version.